by James Nichol of Contemplative Inquiry Blog
Noticing a single corn stalk under our neighbouring birch trees, I wonder whether the seed simply blew in or was planted by an unknown hand. If the latter, what was their intention? I realise that I will never know.
What I do know how much I enjoy its presence in this space at this time. It’s a miracle inviting gratitude and has marked the seasonal moment for me, this first harvest of a now declining year.
I understand more clearly that I do not work well with personified and individualised images of the divine. Something I seems subtly off, as if I am failing to sound my own authentic note in the Great Song of the world.
I believe that we are given different gifts in our encounters with the Cosmos, leading to legitimately different understandings. When I lean in to the notion of divine personality – even when using the term ‘Spirit’ in that sense – I am not fully living my own truth. I subtly disempower myselfand weaken my connection.
For in my universe, when I rest in my own clarity, there is no separation between nature (including culture) and spirit. In the awkward activity of identification and labelling, I answer to terms like animist, panentheist and nondualist.
But these words are approximations, with the power to be distracting and slightly depressing. I can find words that point to my experience well enough. But the explanatory words, the more formal and generalised terms, feel clumsy. There’s a necessary level of unknowing that these isms don’t recognise.
When consciously living in spirit, I am neither alone, as a single human person, nor am I with another being. I am simply in a different dimension of embodied awareness, supported and empowered by the bubbling source from which I spring. For me, Nature is more than the ‘nature’ of dualist spiritualities and of the scientific humanism that grew out of them.
As I harvest the learning, or relearning, of this lesson, I renew my commitment to practice and path, once again revising the beginning and end of the modern Druid’s prayer (1). I move from from ‘Grant, Spirit your protection, and in protection, strength … ‘ to ‘In spirit I seek protection, and in protection, strength …’. I end with ‘and in the love of all existences, the love of this radiant Cosmos’ rather than ‘the love of God/Goddess/Spirit and all goodness’. These small changes formalise and anchor my understanding. For me, they are an important affirmation, illuminating my path.
(1) Traditionally, this prayer runs:
Grant O God/Goddess/Spirit, your protection,
And in protection, strength,
And in strength, understanding,
And in understanding, knowledge,
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it
And in the love of it, the love of all existences
And in the love of all existences, the love of God/Goddess/Spirit and all goodness”.
NB Providing the options of God/Goddess/Spirit is I think an OBOD (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) innovation. The original version, from the late 18th century, simply said ‘God’. Some modern Druids say ‘God and Goddess’.